California hiking

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Photo Gallery: Celebrating the National Park Service Centennial

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By Michael Lanza

When the National Park Service turns 100 on Aug. 25, it will mark not just the diamond anniversary of what writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously called “the best idea we ever had”—it marks the evolution and growth of that idea from a handful of parks created in the early days to a system in many ways without parallel, that protects 52 million acres of mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, deserts, prairies, caves, islands, bays, fjords, badlands, natural arches, and seashores in 59 parks. Without that protection, these places that draw visitors from around the world would otherwise almost certainly have been exploited and destroyed.

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Telescope Peak, Death Valley National Park.

3-Minute Read: Hiking in Death Valley National Park

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By Michael Lanza

On a sunny and calm morning in the middle of May, three companions and I set out from a trailhead at just over 8,100 feet in the Panamint Range of California’s Death Valley National Park, with the temperature at 29° F—which was exactly 80 degrees colder than the temperature we’d seen when we arrived at Furnace Creek, at 190 feet below sea level, four days earlier. Less than three hours later, we stood on the 11,049-foot summit of Telescope Peak (above photo), highest point in the largest national park in the Lower 48, looking down more than 11,000 vertical feet at the bottom of Death Valley—as much relief as there is between the summit of Mount Everest and its primary base camp.

Everywhere you look, Death Valley presents you with extremes.

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A rock climber hiking in the Wonderland of Rocks, Joshua Tree National Park.

Facing the Biggest Challenge: Friendship and Climbing in Joshua Tree

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By Michael Lanza

A dry, invisible waterfall of heat pours from the desert sky as we follow a footpath through the Wonderland of Rocks, a vast archipelago of granite monoliths and spires floating in an ocean of sand in the backcountry of southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park. My friend David and I are in search of one particular crack in one specific stone skyscraper, which feels a little like picking through hundreds of haystacks scattered across a farm in pursuit of one needle.

We high-step through gardens of prickly-pear cacti and other vegetation that has evolved to put a hurt on you for the easy mistake of brushing against it. I pause frequently to consult photos of some of these granite monoliths in my guidebook to help pinpoint our location. I also contemplate—as seems to happen whenever I head out rock climbing for the first time in a while—the complicated human relationship with fear. There’s the natural anxiousness that can accompany trying to claw your way up a sheer cliff. But fear and its antipode, courage, take many forms. One can be so difficult to confront that it destroys lives. The other can save them.

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In the Land of Dr. Seuss: Exploring Joshua Tree

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By Michael Lanza

I feel the familiar nervous excitement just walking up to the base of the sun-warmed granite cliff, climbing gear jangling on my harness, rope over my shoulder. For various reasons, I haven’t gotten on rock in months. But as soon as I start moving upward and stick the first cam into a crack, I realize how much I’ve missed this intensity of focus, this sensation that there’s nothing else in the world except what I’m experiencing right here and now.

There aren’t many things in life that replicate the feeling of an eighth-grade date. For me, rock climbing still does it, after all these years.

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A view from the John Muir Trail of Half Dome, Liberty Cap, and Nevada Fall in Yosemite National Park.

The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls

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By Michael Lanza

My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, is engaged in some heavy intellectual lifting. I can tell by the way she stares quietly, her brow knitted in thought, at Upper Yosemite Falls. We’ve hiked for 90 minutes up a thousand vertical feet of hot, dusty trail above Yosemite Valley to stand below this curtain of water that plunges a sheer 1,430 feet off a cliff, ripping through the air with a sound like fighter jets buzzing us.

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